Autism Encyclopedia

An Encyclopedia of this weird world, by autistics, for autistics.

(This site is very much still in progress, I’ve only gotten through some of this landing page so far. Check back soon for updates! Last updated May 21, 2025)

This site is built off of the belief that autism is not, intrinsically, a flaw, disadvantage, or disability, but a difference in mental processing that, within a world built by non-autistics, for non-autistics, can present problems for autistic people.

It is self-evident that most autistic people face some difficulty in the modern world, normally this is addressed as though that’s entirely the “fault” of the autistic person – at no point are the conventional sensibilities challenged, or even acknowledged to be, often completely arbitrary. Instead it’s just asserted that the autistic person is broken and too dumb to understand the “right” way to do things. Attempts to “help us” to “integrate” tend to boil down to trying to train us like a dogs – rewards for doing what’s “right” and punish them for what’s “wrong” and that’s it.

That doesn’t tend to work well for humans.

Here, I am, instead, seeking to understand the way that non-autistic people operate, and, acknowledge that’s it’s often completely arbitrary or a result of their differences, without judging one to be “right” or “wrong”. The intent being to start writing out the unwritten rulebook of this game of life we’re playing. To train ourselves like athletes training for a sport – to be able to play the game when we want to because we know the rules and strategies, but with the awareness that it’s a game with rules and regulations, and we’re not “broken” just because we don’t automatically tend to play by those rules.

What IS Autism?

This isn’t going off some medical journal trying to make this out to be a treatable disease or describing it by “symptoms” within our weird society – a cold is the result of a virus, it’s not “a cough and runny nose”. This is taking some insight from others, but the specific framing is my own.

As far as I can tell, autism is a DIFFERENCE in the function of a persons ATTENTION. That’s it that’s all. Everything else falls out from that. At their core, an autistic person has a more sharply focused attention than a non-autistic person, and the “more autistic” the person is, the more that’s the case.

The best explanation I’ve found for this is an image:

The left side, an NT brain, has a single point of sharp focus, and gets less and less detailed as you get farther away from that point. You still get a general “vibe” of what’s going on, but only sort of context.

This isn’t really how they see, nor is the right image how an autistic person actually sees, instead it’s an abstract visualization of their attention, and includes things like sounds, smells, sensations, your own body, etc. For an NT, they have a center of attention, whether it’s something their seeing, as in the image, or a sound, or a sensation, or, anything else, and everything else gets sort of halfway filtered out, it gets blurry. It doesn’t fully go away, but nor do you get the fine detail.

An autistic person on the other hand, has a much larger area of focus, you’ll notice that a larger portion of the image is in sharp focus, but everything outside that area is completely lost, completely cut off. If we think about sort of the total number of pixels, or the total amount of attention or brainpower being used, it’s the same, in the NT it’s more spread out over everything, in the Autistic, it’s more focused.

You could also think about it a bit like a computer screen – an autistic person might have a couple of monitors, but each can only have a single window up, and nothing in the background. An NT works more like a modern computer with a single, small screen, maybe even close to a tablet. You can minimize a window, like keep a webpage open and signed in, but switch to another tab, or keep spotify running even though something else is on-screen. Having only that one window up at once, any time you want to do two things at once, you just minimize one window and pull up the other; you switch back and forth. An asp/autistic brain can have a couple windows open at once, we can sort of hold more in our conscious awareness at once, but that’s it. Nothing can run “in the background”, if you want to switch from your browser to spotify, or excel, or some other application, you have to close all your tabs and close the browser, then open the next one, wait for it to boot, then you can use it. These aren’t “better” or “worse”, they’re advantageous and disadvantageous at different things and in different situations.

This explains a lot of the noticeable differences from NT’s, many Autistics are very sensitive to specific stimuli – for me certain noises absolutely drive me up a wall to an extent that’s difficult for most people to understand. If I’m in a room with someone who’s sniffling (like they should blow their nose, but instead they suck it back in. every. ten. seconds.) I will become incandescent with rage. The reason this is associated is attention – when they sniff, everything else in my brain shuts off completely and switches to paying attention to that. With the computer thing, it’s like if you were in the middle of using your computer, and someone came and just unplugged it. It’s not that big a deal once, but if you’re trying to DO anything else, you can’t, because ten seconds later, while the machine is still booting up, they unplug it again. And again. And again. And again. Image you’re at work, and the coworker next to you just keeps unplugging your computer every fifteen seconds when you’ve got something due in an hour, you’d get pissed at them pretty quickly too! I have found that IF I have absolutely nothing else to do, and I can instead allow myself to focus, completely, ON the stimuli that are triggering, I can stand them – they stop being unbearable. BUT, I must be doing, and thinking about, LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE.

For NT’s, this is difficult to understand for two reasons – one, those stimuli can go into the “fuzzy” areas of their awareness. Instead of pulling the center of their attention to it, their brain puts a tiny bit of sort of “background” processing to it, determines it’s not worth putting more attention on, and the rest of them ignores it. Also, even if their attention is diverted, it’s more like changing a tab than unplugging the computer – they can get back to what they were doing in a fraction of a second because everything that they were thinking about is still sort of held in their brain.

Other aspects of Autism/Asp, viewed through this lens, also make a lot of sense. “Social cues” are a big thing, often we’re viewed as being “unable” to read things like tone, body language, maintain eye contact, etc. This isn’t true, it’s again, just that our attention is much more focused. If we’re looking someone in the eyes, we’re actually LOOKING AT THEIR EYES, not just vaguely pointing our head in their general direction. We can read specific social cues just fine, if we know what to look for, and are looking for them, if we’re not paying attention to that particular thing, then it won’t be received. Something which an NT would consider simple, like a conversation, actually has dozens of elements going on at once, it’s impossible to “pay attention” to “a conversation” or “a person” – I can pay attention to say, the literal words someone is saying, subcontext beneath those words, maybe their tone, their body positioning and movement, their head and eye movements, their appearance, relate what they’re saying to my own experience, or shared history with the person, the emotion behind what they’re saying, or any number of other things, but not ALL of those AT THE SAME TIME. An NT doesn’t give their full attention to any one thing, instead they put like 3% of their brainpower behind each of them and a dozen others, so even “paying full attention” to the other person means that only maybe 60% of their brain is actually occupied with that person. The other 40% is paying attention to their surroundings, their own body, planning what they’re doing later, background music, and whatever else, and filtering all of that OUT of their awareness. They’re not aware of MOST of what their brain is doing for them, so they don’t get it when we have to do ALL of that consciously.

Also, for an NT, their attention is much less of an active thing, it mostly follows where they’re looking, and vis versa. An interesting thing I’ve found just interacting with NT’s and other Aspies is that often NTs involuntarily look at whatever they’re paying attention to, even if they try not to. Or they have a very hard time paying any mental attention to something they’re not, whereas most Aspies have zero problem being completely focused on something they can’t see or aren’t looking at. Most NTs have very little active control or even awareness of their own attention, it kind of just falls on whatever’s in front of them right now. So to do something like homework or work work or whatever, they just have to put it in front of them, and their brain will start focusing on it naturally.

Special interests are just something we can put all of our brainpower towards consistently, which is stimulating. For NTs, their brains ability to filter OUT stimuli is so strong that they need to do things like go to clubs with music so loud it literally damages their hearing, bright lights flashing in their faces, a hundred people shoulder to shoulder with them AND slam half a dozen drinks – just to get something
“through the filter” and have enough in their attention to not be bored. That’s crazy.

Not to say autstic people can’t enjoy particular kinds of sensory overload, or are necessarily overloaded in those situations, but it tends to be the case that we tend not to have that same mental filter, so our attention can be fully occupied without intense sensory stimuli.

Meltdowns aren’t even remotely an autistic thing, it’s just that the things that push us to the point of them, by the world we live in, isn’t easily understood by most NTs. If you take an NT and put them in an environment that gets “through their filter” to the same degree it does for an Autistic/Aspie (i.e. literal, physical torture) for days on end, while telling them they’re just being sensitive and dismantling their entire life in front of them THEY’LL GET UPSET TOO. I think a lot of those “reality” shows, weirdly enough, are a pretty good example of this. Take “normal” people and put them into a situation they’re not used to and don’t quite fit in to, with an adversarial dynamic, and they usually end up “melting down” at least once within just a couple DAYS. Now leave someone in that for years, neigh, DECADES, and they’ll be in a pretty bad way. Being an autistic kid is like being stuck for years on the weirdest, most petty, drama-fueled reality show imaginable. You never signed up for it and you can’t leave. And doing ANYTHING to try to get out of it just drags you in deeper and makes it worse. Pointing out the problems or asking people to stop not only makes them go harder, but makes you the “weird one”. And people wonder why we get upset.

WHY is autism?

I’m a strong believer that 99.9% of people, most autistics included, are naturally stable IN the environment we evolved for (or if you’re religious – that god built us for a simpler time, not the weird world we live in today). In a society of hunter-gatherers, or even an earlier civilization, having some people be autistic is not only not a disadvantage – but an advantage. The “symptoms” of autism, things like special interests, pattern recognition and everything sensors, would convey an advantage in some situations. You think a normal person is going to systematically smash every kind of rock they can find together until they figure out which ones start fire? No they’re going to get bored and go back to hanging out and telling stories and doin’ what humans do after two or three don’t work. Autistic person however, much more likely to see some rocks spark one time and develop an interest in what the *heck* is going on, and become obsessed with it for a couple months, and TELL EVERYONE EVERYTHING THEY’VE LEARNED. Whether that’s about starting fires, or knapping spear heads, or making bows, or fletching, or curing meats, or treating disease. I have to imagine that 90% of the technological advancement of humankind was not made by chad who actively decided to sit around and bang rocks together instead of banging something else against something else, but the autistic guy who became completely and totally obsessed with the different types of rocks in the area for six months. Again, not a bug, it’s a feature. It also wouldn’t make sense for all people, or even most people, to be like this, you’d want the majority of people to mainly care about finding food and water and shelter, and forming tribes and societies and making more humans and whatnot, but it’d be a HUGE benefit to those people to have just a few people who go have random obsessions for a few months or years at a time – having someone spend their entire life converting wolves into dogs is going to be WAY more valuable to the survival of a big tribe than that person just doing the same thing everyone else does.

Even in modern society, we often perform a similar function, you look at people like Newton, or Euler, or Einstein, or any one of the many other individual people who appreciably advanced humanity VERY few of them were what you’d call “normal”. Maybe some weren’t autistic per se, but they definitely weren’t “neurotypical”. In the modern day especially, we depend more than ever on the concerted, obsessive effort of a small number of people, who do what they do not because it makes them the most money, or makes them famous, or more attractive to others, or anything, but because they are simply driven to do so. Our society absolutely depends on this, yet that kind of thing is usually described as a “special interest” – at best people quietly look down on us because of it, and at worst actively mock, attack, or try to “fix” it.

NT’s also have “special interests”, they usually just pick from a short list of socially acceptable ones that don’t actually matter or contribute to anything, because it’s what was most convenient, they don’t actually, really, have any genuine interest in the thing. Sports is a big one, you really, deeply care if that guy in spandex can move that ball past that line? No, it’s just an excuse to drink beer and eat snacks and yell. You really care about what some imaginary character on TV said about another imaginary character? No, you just want to have an emotional experience. There’s nothing wrong with these but the point is there’s absolutely nothing more right or sane about them, they’re a way to have an EXPERIENCE that you want to have. Not every autistic special interest props up modern society – it doesn’t have to, and we’re not all benefactors of society. Some of us just really like trains. Or planes and rockets (me in a big way), or rocks, or beads, or history, or harry potter, or roman plumbing, or whatever else, and that’s fine. Some NT watching football doesn’t do jack shit for anyone else on the planet, but they enjoy the experience. Same way, I enjoy learning about rockets and satellites _{(I mean, that did *kinda* help in some way, given that I used to work on rockets and satellites, but this was more for entertainment than learning useful information)}. I get to have the EXPERIENCE of excitement, or sadness, or curiosity when I uncover something new, or there’s news involving it, or something similar. Go watch this and tell me it’s not as exciting as anything that’s happened in football: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9hXqzkH7YA

The function of an autistic special interest, is the same as a normal interest:

1) Occupy the persons mind (i.e. it should be interesting)

2) Act as a vessel to an experience for the person

3) Offer a consistent situation for that experience to happen